Posted by starfallg 7 hours ago
To avoid this loop, I ended up creating Bento, a single HTML file with everything you need in a slide tool including animations and shared editing. There's no install or cloud login, everything works offline. The default deck is around 560 KB and it doesn't need to fetch anything once you got it.
Open it in a browser and then you can edit, present, print and save. Share it via email or via Airdrop and all they need is a browser to edit, present and also do live collab on the slides. Drop it in to Claude or ChatGPT to transform existing pptx files into Bento slides. There is no cloud involved, only an encrypted blind relay to allow for shared editing. The relay doesn't see any of the data.
Check it out at https://bento.page/slides/ which takes you straight to the editor.
Go to https://bento.page/guestbook/ to try out the live guestbook to experience share editing / collab.
There is also a gallery with some sample decks on the website - https://bento.page/
All the code is MIT licensed and you can find it here - https://github.com/nyblnet/bento . I used reveal.js with several other libraries (including some homegrown ones), and Claude Code.
I hope you don't get cease and desisted by MS for mentioning PowerPoint.
Great work! I hope to see more and more apps like this in the spirit of "Toss it all into context"
For people clicking on a link to some slides that someone shared, it seems like starting out in viewing mode with a prominent edit button might be better than starting out in edit mode?
Also, swiping left to get back to the first slide puts me back in the editor (I went too far), and then hitting slideshow puts me back where I started so I have to swipe left again.
The swipe left on first slide is a feature though, its to help mobile users get back to the editor easily.
Maybe display speaker notes by default if the screen is in portrait mode?
I'll have a think on this tonight and I'm sure we can do a tablet speaker notes mode.